


On the Biology and Senses of Various Animal People

by Farla



Category: Meta - Fandom, She-Ra and the Princesses of Power (2018)
Genre: Animal Traits, Biology, Gen, Meta, She-Ra and the Princesses of Power Meta, Speculative Evolution
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-21
Updated: 2019-04-21
Packaged: 2020-01-23 04:06:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,264
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18541933
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Farla/pseuds/Farla
Summary: Combining what we see demonstrated in the show and what we know about their real-life counterparts to make some guesses.





	On the Biology and Senses of Various Animal People

Hey, let's talk animal people! I think they're neat, I hope to see more of them, and I've done a smattering of research into how things might work.

Let's start off with the people of Thaymor. While we haven't seem much of the deer/goat/other cloven-hoof people, they're very important because we see them in their own community, midway through a festival based around things they like and appreciate.

What does this tell us? That the animal people of She-Ra mostly function like human people.

Deer are functionally blind. Their eyes are built to pick up if anything, ever, moves, and report A MOTION HAPPENED. To actually identify something in their surroundings, deer rely on scent and sound. The festival-goers do not have lovely balls of darkness as eyes, however, and they also don't have the visibly slitted eyes of goats or other somewhat more sighted prey species. What they do have is whites to their eyes, which is something unusual about human eyes in particular. They're eating a lot of fruit, which is a big part of why humans needed to have good color vision, and their festival as a whole is very visually based with dancing, flowing ribbons, wearing things like green and pink that most animals can't distinguish between, and gesturing with hands. Meanwhile, we see no one shoving their noses at things, so they're clearly very comfortable relying on senses other than smell.

Either the animal-people of She-Ra are humans with a dab of genetic engineering to make furries or there's been some magic convergent evolution getting them to roughly the same point as humans. The fact their legs look super human is a point in favor of being very modified humans - human knees are garbage and it's probably because we started in trees and then went bipedal, so without a stint of that their hind legs should be close to standard mammal ones. But convergent evolution where goats stand up and evolve hands appears to be what we're going with due to the tweets about what colors Catra can see, since I really doubt anyone would think removing colors is an important part of the furry experience and intentionally knock them out. (And anyway, if you were going to make furries, you probably would fix human knees while you were there, so their humanoid legs could point to evolution's uncompassionate hand.)

Deer and goats who evolved to be really similar to humans are going to have vastly improved eyesight but would still have differences in their specialties. Since their eyes start out focused on peripheral vision and motion, they're presumably going to be better at that, but likely be much worse at a task like gauging distance or picking out a still object. Their ability to focus over a wide range of distances is probably going to be less too. Likely not a lot of very small detail-work to their culture, and more things like glasses to tell what's going on far away.

(It is possible that they see colors we don't - raindeer, at least, evolved to see ultra-violet, ultra-violet can also be helpful in agriculture, and the festival outfits seem a bit plain, which means it's possible that when one of them is wearing an apparently single-color outfit, it's actually two different colors to their eyes.)

How about Catra? Interestingly, Catra does not have the humanoid eyes of the deer/goat people and instead has the enormous iris normal to the rest of the animal kingdom. This actually makes a degree of sense if Catra's species is either still carnivorous or at least evolved to be an omnivore only recently. Herbivores who farm are going to want good color vision so they can notice plant issues at a distance, but if you aren't growing or harvesting, it isn't important if the plant is green or yellow today. (It also points to a shifted possible point of division/prejudice that isn't animal people vs human people but animal eyes vs human eyes, agriculture and presumably early civilization vs hunters who came to it later.)

As we love cats, people have done a lot of research on how cats actually see, and the best breakdown I can find is https://www.businessinsider.com/pictures-of-how-cats-see-the-world-2013-10 It has a lot of pictures to really help visualize it.

To sum up, cats see color, but they see much less of it in favor of being more sensitive to light/dark. Also, as far as we can tell color simply does not matter much to a cat which is why it's hard to nail down exactly what they see. You can't tell if they can't see the difference between two colors or if they don't understand they're supposed to be paying attention to that. On the brighter side, Catra is unlikely to care much about her limited color range because she's not too interested about what she can see either.

The upside of having tons of light-sensitive rods instead of color-sensitive cones is they have far better night vision. However, it's not going to be just night goggles on a human. Due to trying to pick up every scrap of light, the world as a whole is much blurrier, and they also have better peripheral vision which has a tradeoff of causing blur, and on top of all that, they're quite nearsighted.

Now, just as farming would put pressure on animal people to improve their color vision, increasing in size and standing up is going to mean Catra must be better at focusing than a housecat. She operates at much longer distances than they do. Catra also spends a lot of time jumping about up high, which is actually more of a monkey trait than a cat one, and suggests she's extremely good at judging distance. She probably has relatively good eyesight for the area directly around her but is bad at really long-distance vision - perhaps that's why she needs to grab the spyglass in the fifth episode to confirm she's seeing She-Ra. And she's presumably very motion sensitive (certainly the concept art where she's ready to chase a dot suggests this), which would be different than humans, who are unusual in their skill at picking non-moving objects from their environment. Freezing in place to avoid being seen would work better to avoid Catra, but god help you if you have to sneak past her.

Assuming Catra sees in the cat rather than human spectrum, the Fright Zone and Catra's own uniform look about the same to her even though humans see green and red as extremely distinct colors. Part of why young Catra was getting caught and beaten could be that she often thought she was more hidden than she was, especially combined with the idea that to her, half of being seen would be because you moved.

Also, going by the tweet that ended up linking a more inaccurate visualization of what cats see, it's also possible Catra is colorblind even for a cat and the world is just shades of blue to her, just as the fact most humans can distinguish between red and green doesn't mean some humans can't.

We do know one fact for sure about Catra's different senses - she seems to have a better sense of smell. She doesn't seem to use it much, though, suggesting it's weaker than a regular cat's and/or that her upbringing led to her not relying on it much because their training focused on the human mainstays of sight and sound.

As at least half of She-Ra fandom knows already, cats can't taste sugar. This is actually a bit complicated. Losing the ability to taste sugar is actually very rare because sugar is such a good thing to eat. It's believed it only happened in cats because they've been obligate carnivores so long. Civilization and omnivoury would push hard for them to regain that so they could notice and seek out carbohydrates, especially given they're much smarter than cats and so their brain is demanding far more energy. That said...taste receptors are pretty complicated. Humans can't taste fat, something similarly full of precious energy, and instead identify fatty, high-calorie food through texture. Furthermore, an enormous amount of what we consider "taste" is based on what we smell. And cats have a tiny fraction of the number of taste receptors on their tongue anyway. They're far more scent-based. Catra, then, quite possibly has a concept of "sweet" that's a combination of smell and texture, but if you handed her a sugar cube she'd get as much out of it as you would a lump of lard, and she'd generally find food without much of a smell to it "tasteless" - kind of like eating airplane food with a stuffy nose.

Cats do have a sense of taste about things that matter, namely, she should be able to taste bitter/spicy, and she would absolutely hate it. Bitter/spicy are how plants tell you that they're trying to kill you. Humans evolved eating those to the point we can co-opt many of their poisons and actually use them for our own wellbeing. Cats did not, and agriculture usually focuses on taking what you're already eating and making it less poisonous and bitter, so convergent evolution is unlikely to apply to how much they like broccoli.

Also, cats can not only pick up very quiet sounds, but can hear an enormous range of frequencies, including many we can't.

Now, how about Rogelio?

First, there's the issue lizards are an enormous and varied group and second, we also don't even know if he's a lizardman or a crocodileman. Lizards are, broadly, your cold-blooded and daylight-active creatures. Alligators and related crocodilians, on the other hand, are of a branch of birdlike creatures. The thing is, the sprinting, high-metabolism creatures who made up almost all of the crocodilians died off along with the rest of the big birdlike creatures at the end of the Cretateous and it was only the ones cosplaying lizards who survived to modern day.

We know Rogelio is warmblooded because he doesn't seem to behave differently at any point of day, and a crocodile is miles closer to that than a lizard. However, it doesn't seem like it matters that crocodiles would take less tweaking to turn into bipedal animal people because this is magic convergent evolution that ruins perfectly good goat knees.

We also know he has animal rather than human eyes. It's Word of God Catra doesn't see the color range humans do and it's canon that the cloven-hoof people have eyes that are either close to or identical to human eyes in both look and fuction, so to extrapolate ridiculously from that tiny sample size, his eyesight should be more strongly based on how the eyes of lizards or crocodiles work.

Which is to say, good to great!

Crocodiles have similar color vision to mammals, so he'd be seeing the same kind of things as Catra, unless he's descended from Australian lines, in which case he's of the three-color line like humans, or based on one of the extinct lines, who may have had the better vision we see in both their reptilian and avian relatives.

Now, if he's a lizard, we're quite possibly looking at much better color vision than humans. Just about everyone who isn't a mammal uses double cones rather than our single cones, and while it's hard to be clear on exactly what they're seeing, those seem to provide better sensitivity than our own. (The surviving line of mammals all came through a period of being burrowing noctural critters, and that's reflected across the mammal kingdom.) Many reptiles can also see wavelengths we can't, like ultra-violet. They also possess a functional third eye atop their head - while it doesn't "see" images, it's generally good enough to pick up motion. (It's also very important for regulating day/night cycles, so either the Fright Zone made sure their lighting is the right wavelength or lizardpeople would have difficulty sleeping and waking - given how important sunlight is to lizards in general and that everyone's bone structure looks okay, it's actually pretty likely their lighting is designed to provide what's needed.)

Lizards also tend to have their eyes optimized for daytime vision, though nocturnal ones exist. Given we see him active in the day with everyone else, he may well have far better vision than a human during the day but significantly worse vision at night.

Remember how I said cats can hear a wider range of sounds than humans? Lizards are the opposite. They have good hearing for most sounds but they're going to miss some lower frequencies and many, many higher frequencies that humans pick up. Unless he's actually based on a snake, which usually have pretty bad hearing.

Lizards also have okay to great senses of smell and crocodilians are more reliably great, but we can see from the cloven-hoof people that doesn't necessarily mean lizard people would. And we haven't seen anything from him to suggest he does. However, we've barely seen him at all. A solid "dunno" for this one.

"Dunno" is, I think, a good point to end on. As with any time we're dealing with magic and as with any time we're dealing something that is very much a sidenote, there's a lot of varied ways to take things, especially combined with the fact we often can't be sure of just what the world does look like to a totally different animal than ourselves. And it makes for a really fun jumping-off point.


End file.
